1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for controlling an audio recording level, and more particularly to a method and apparatus for variably controlling a recording level of audio data recorded on a rewritable recording medium such as a DVD-RW disk.
2. Description of the Background Art
In recent times, there has been newly developed an optical disk capable of storing video data and/or audio data of high quality and long playtime. This optical disk, for example, a DVD-RW disk, has become increasingly popular as a recording medium. Therefore, there has been proposed an optical disk apparatus, for example, a DVD-Recorder, for writing or reading video/audio data on the optical disk and it is expected that such optical disk apparatus will be further developed.
Audio data having a variety of audio formats may be written or recorded on the optical disk. For example, audio data in song units may be recorded on one optical disk in either the DVD-Audio format or the MP3-Audio format. The optical disk apparatus reads out DVD-Audio formatted audio data or MP3-Audio formatted audio data from the optical disk, and decodes them with original audio data to reproduce them.
In this regard, a user records many songs of various audio formats on a single optical disk using an optical disk apparatus, and selects one song data from all the song data recorded on the optical disk to instruct the optical disk apparatus to reproduce the selected song data. However, since the optical disk apparatus directly records a variety of different types/formats of external audio data on an optical disk such as a DVD-RW disk, the audio recording levels of the recorded songs are different from each other, e.g., in the case where audio data input levels are different for every song. Therefore, irregular playback audio levels for every song occur in an audio data playback operation. This is a problem because the user must manually control the audio volume level to play different songs at the desired audio volume level.